Abstract

An approach is proposed to generate a quasi-isolated sub-cycle pulse in X-rayfree-electron lasers. Its principle is based on the recently proposed concept of mono-cycle harmonic generation [T. Tanaka, Phys. Rev. Lett. 114, 044801 (2015)], but uses the chirped microbunch with high-order harmonic frequencies. This allows the synthesis of a sub-cycle field structure in the coherent radiation. Moreover, the tolerance in energy spread is greatly relaxed compared with the originally proposed scheme. Additionally, the practical procedure for realizing the scheme is greatly simplified. Numerical investigations show that a quasi-isolated sub-cycle pulse with a gigawatt peak power can be generated using an electron beam with a realistic energy spread as conventional accelerators for free-electron lasers.